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: Robin Hood (2018)
Robin Hood remains pretty much the best piece of intellectual property for feature films. It's a populist story of good versus evil. It's tried and tested through centuries of stories, songs, plays, books, cinema, television and animation. Countless artists have brought in new characters, abandoned old ones, and reworked and remixed every element of tone, ...
REVIEW: The Meg (2018)
A commercially funded science expedition sets out to the bottom of the Marianas Trench to prove whether or not a deeper section of the ocean exists. It does - and furthermore it is populated by a previously undiscovered ecosystem, included the presumed-extinct prehistoric giant shark known as megalodon. The expedition is attacked and escapes; however, ...
REVIEW: American Animals (2018)
Two Kentucky university students devise a plan to rob the college library, drawing several of their friends to assist in the heist. An encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood crime thrillers cannot, however, prepare them for the real thing. American Animals, a crime film written and directed by Bart Layton, freely adapts a real-life attempted university heist ...
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 ...
