Feature Essays
“We’re out of sake for the saint” | Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937)
Within Japan Humanity and Paper Balloons has long been celebrated as one of the greatest films ever made, as well as one of the most significant films ...
REVIEW: First Man (2018)
In 1962 engineer and test flight pilot Neil Armstrong joins NASA as part of its second generation of astronauts, assigned to the Gemini and Apollo missions in the hopes of sending humans to the moon. As his work begins to consume his life, it places a growing strain on his relationship with his wife and ...
REVIEW: Harmony: The Five Frequencies Saga Part I (2018)
Harmony (Jessica Falkholt) is a homeless 21 year-old who possesses the ability to absorb the fear of other people. When she is drawn into both the life of a troubled young man (Jerome Meyer) and the activities of a violent street gang, she must learn to master her powers to face the greater challenge to ...
REVIEW: XXX: The Return of Xander Cage (2017)
"Pandora's Box", a technological device capable of seizing control of satellites and crashing them into the Earth, has been stolen. In an attempt to recover it, CIA agent Jane Marke (Toni Collette) enlists the presumed-dead former agent Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) to retrieve it. XXX was a middling 2002 action film, one followed by a middling ...
REVIEW: Our Shining Days (2017)
In an exclusive music academy, the classical and Chinese folk students are fiercely separated, with the folk music department on the verge of being closed down. Chen Jing (Xu Lu) plays the yangqin, a Chinese fore-runner to the piano, and has a crush on the school's top piano player Wang Wen (Luo Mingjie). When he ...
REVIEW: Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Two years after his fight against the Green Goblin, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) struggles to balance his part-time job and university studies with his secret life as Spider-Man. Things look up when he meets the scientific genius Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) - but then a terrible accident transforms Octavius into the deranged super-villain Dr Octopus, ...
REVIEW: Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story (2018)
There is a huge range of subject matters available for a good documentary. The best to my mind are those that showcase something very real, but which you would be unlikely to believe unless someone had spend years putting together a documentary about them. That is certainly the case with Chris Sievey, an aspiring pop ...
REVIEW: The Nun (2018)
1952. When a nun in a remote Romanian abbey commits suicide, the Vatican dispatches Father Burke (Demian Bichir) and the novice Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) to investigate. Irene believes it is a run-of-the-mill, albeit unusual, assignment. Father Burke already knows that their mission is of a more supernatural nature. While every studio in Hollywood fights ...
