Here, you can find reviews of older films. They can be canonical classics or hidden gems that have just seen the light of a 4k restoration
Flowing
Like the opening dichotomous image of the wooden poles stuck in water and their wavering reflections, there is an impending doom haunting the impeccable unity from Naruse’s great-as-usual narrative instincts and dramaturgy. Similar to The Whole Family Works, the film’s progression seems to be dictated by passage of days itself instead of specific plot elements. What’s…
Yearning
Ostensibly a two-hander, but the movie feels like Naruse’s largest film in terms of scope (not just because it’s shot on TohoScope). The opening scene, following an advertising truck of the new supermarket in town, proposes an external force that complicates Naruse’s usual examination of society through an individual’s navigation of its imposed pressures and…
The Birds
The connection with Psycho lies beyond the stuffed birds inside the Bates Motel. It’s also how the mommy issue becomes externalized not only with an actively tormented mother-figure in full flesh with strange psychological attachment with her son, but also through the malevolent attack of the birds that exacerbated the strange meet-the-parent situation by 1000%. Obviously,…
Canyon Passage
Jacque Tourneur’s Canyon Passage is as about rituals as any westerns. For it is through patterns of distinctive habits that we can clearly understand the characters onscreen, whose presences feel permanent despite we’ve only been with them for less than 90 minutes. These are Logan’s constant travelling, Camrose’s flipping of a coin, and Linnet peaking…
Review: The Children’s Hour
One can easily trace the theatrical roots of William Wyler’s 1961 film adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s 1934 stage play The Children’s Hour: the actors are facing away from each other when delivering dialogues, turning their bodies toward the cinematic eye. They often exclaim with a desperate unnaturalness and a lack of dramatic verisimilitude that one…
Cinema Travelogue 