“A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.”
Ali Asgari is a good representative of this quote by Jean Renoir, because "Until Tomorrow" is unmistakably the same film about two characters who have to search for a solution within a few hours, always coming up against societal limits, that he has made repeatedly throughout his career in the form of short and feature films. However, he uses the realistic approach,…
Natalia López Gallardo's debut feature is stylistically a mature work that is not so much aligned with the films of her husband Carlos Reygadas (despite the inevitable Tarkovsky references), but is rather inspired by the cinema of Lucrecia Martel. Similar to the protagonist Véro from "La mujer sin cabeza", Isabel also finds herself in an exceptional emotional situation, which leads her to transcend her class boundaries and search for a missing person. For her depiction, the director uses similar cinematographic…
The restoration of Bong Joon-ho's masterpiece of the crime genre was followed by the closure of the Hwaseong case in September 2019, when the real culprit Lee Choon-jae was finally convicted almost thirty years after his last murder based on DNA results. Memories of Murder had also helped to keep the cases, which might have otherwise been forgotten, in collective memory. The dark and atmospheric film was one of the most significant works of the Korean New Wave at the…
Kisapmata is a dark psychological domestic thriller released shortly after the nominal termination of Martial Law in the Philippines that has lost none of its frightening power. The story is based on a piece of literary journalism entitled "The House on Zapote Street", which depicted a real event from 1961. To research the story told in six episodes, the author Nick Joaquín conducted interviews with actual eyewitnesses. In contrast to the original story, however, Mike de Leon's film, produced two…
