Pop stars Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, known internationally as the Pet Shop Boys, take a melancholic stroll through a warped, deteriorating England in Jack Bond’s surreal art film It Couldn’t Happen Here. It was a commercial failure on release … Continue reading REVIEW: It Couldn’t Happen Here (1987)
Tsai Ming-liang remains one of global cinema’s great oddities. With each subsequent release his works seem more esoteric, more difficult to categorise, and increasingly closer to being impossible to explain without sounding like a posing eccentric. His debut feature, Rebels of … Continue reading REVIEW: Days (2020)
Sogo Ishii, more recently professionally credited as Gakuryū Ishii, is a pivotal figure in Japanese cinema, but until very recently a lack of international distribution has kept him out of the limelight beyond his own country. He is a pioneer … Continue reading REVIEW: Dead End Run (2003)
Here’s the pitch: this is the story of Jeanne d’Arc, the 15th century French peasant who claimed to experience religious visions and whose participation in the Hundred Years’ War boosted French morale and helped them win the war. It is … Continue reading REVIEW: Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017)
Qing Ting (Liu Yongfang) is a young Chinese woman who leaves the security of a Buddhist temple for a job in a large-scale dairy farm. It is there she meets Ke Fan (Su Shangqing), a rebellious and angry young man. … Continue reading REVIEW: Dragonfly Eyes (2018)
Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang is, I think, one of the world’s most interesting filmmakers. It is not simply that he produces interesting and deepful artful narrative features including Rebels of a Neon God and Goodbye, Dragon Inn. He also makes a broad range … Continue reading REVIEW: Walker (2012)
A run-down Taipei cinema screens its final movie: King Hu’s legendary wuxia film Dragon Inn. While the film plays the cinema’s disabled cashier (Chen Shiang-chyi) slowly goes about her work, young gay men awkwardly use the theatre as a place to … Continue reading REVIEW: Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003)
Regular readers of this website will likely be aware of my love for director Takashi Miike. He is one of Japan’s most versatile directors, jumping from genre to genre pretty much on a film by film basis. He seems as … Continue reading REVIEW: The Bird People in China (1998)
A young woman goes to see her grandfather in hospital. He is suffering deeply from depression, and clearly some additional mental illnesses because he is soon chasing a cleaning lady around the ward with a knife. Before long that sequence … Continue reading REVIEW: Love and… (2015)
Always push your viewing habits. I am not demanding that you do so constantly, but always make sure you push a little on your comfort zones. If you only ever watch science fiction, go watch a straight drama. If you … Continue reading REVIEW: Where Are You Going? (2016)
FictionMachine 