Category Film Reviews

‘THE HATEFUL EIGHT’ (2015): A FILM BY QUENTIN TARANTINO

January 29, 2016 Film ReviewsUpdates

In turbulent, uncertain times, the adventures of our lives can intersect and overlap, entangling one’s fate with the destinies of others.

What do a pair of bounty hunters, a female prisoner, an unseemly posse of outlaws and gunslingers, and a former war general have in common? In writer/director Quentin Tarantino's latest outing, they are forced to seek sanctuary in the confines of a rustic Haberdashery during the course of a raging, punishing blizzard. What unfolds is a bloody, stomach-turning smorgasbord (part western, part political satire, part detective mystery) that is as much about

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‘THE LOBSTER’ (2015): A FILM BY YORGOS LANTHIMOS

August 26, 2015 Film ReviewsUpdates


What does it mean to be human? How are we different from other species? If our humanity were in question, what type of animal would we choose to become? Would our preference impact on the way that we perceive and treat others? If one of the dimensions of being human is the pursuit of personal freedom, how is this negotiated in an increasingly bureaucratic world? And at what price?


I find myself pondering these slippery and elusive questions after viewing The Lobster (2015),

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‘PARTNERS IN CRIME’ (2014): A FILM BY CHANG JUNG-CHI

August 26, 2015 Film ReviewsUpdates


‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,’ writes Albert Camus (1913-1960) in his celebrated essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), ‘and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest ⎯ whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories ⎯ come afterwards.’


If the Nobel Prize winning author, journalist and philosopher is correct, then the gravity and

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‘SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE’ (2015): A FILM BY LESLYE HEADLAND

August 26, 2015 Film Reviews


When it comes to relationships, some couples take their sweet time to sort out their baggage…and board the same ride.


For one party, the obstacle to commitment can be a fear of failure. For the other, an unhealthy obsession with a former infatuation. In both cases, infidelity can be a convenient Get Out of Jail card; temporarily liberating but ultimately unsatisfying.


In writer/director Leslye Headland's Sleeping with Other People (2015), Jake (Jason

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‘MY GOLDEN DAYS’ (2015): A FILM BY ARNAUD DESPLECHIN

August 26, 2015 Film ReviewsUpdates


We are all time travellers, our present lives shuffling between the miasmas of memory and elusive projections onto an unforeseeable future.


And cinema, as a multi-sensory and dynamically temporal medium, seems conducive to the task of recounting our personal mythologies and inter-temporal journeys.


In co-writer/director Arnaud Desplechin's My Golden Days (2015), a detained anthropologist's recollection of his youth assumes the layered, oscillating

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