Secretary (2002) first published by Movie Gazette In the typical romantic comedy, a woman meets her ideal man, and after being separated from him by a range of comic trials, eventually marries him, with the prospect of happiness for ever after. So Steven Shainberg‘s directorial debut Secretary belongs to the same genre as, say, The…
Piercing first published by VODzilla.co Piercing opens, and indeed closes, with an external shot of buildings, as the camera zooms and cranes past the windows of different apartments, each containing its own cellular family, and stories within storeys. Of course the film – Nicholas Pesce’s second feature, following his monochrome serial killer debut The Eyes…
Piercing first published by Sight & Sound, April 2019 Review: Takashi Miike’s astonishing Audition (1999), adapted from the 1997 novel of Ryu Murakami, helped introduce Western audiences to both J-horror and ‘torture porn’, without ever really sitting easily in either of those categories. Now Piercing, adapted from the homonymous 1994 novel by Murakami, similarly gouges beneath its own surface…
Let The Corpses Tan first published by Sight & Sound, in a preview piece on the Cult strand from the London Film Festival 2017 The searing sun. A shot is heard. A bullet shell falls. Extreme close-ups on three faces. A gun is aimed. A man says, “I never miss, is this what you want?” A…
Pet first published by VODzilla.co Pet opens with a bobbing shot of a tropical island and with the sound of seagulls, only for those squawks to resolve into the persistent beeping of an alarm clock, and for the image to reveal itself as a large wall poster placed over the sleeping – and now waking –…
Ichi the Killer first published by Movie Gazette Based on a popular Japanese comicbook by Hideo Yamamoto, Takashi Miike’s controversial Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1, or Killer 1) translates perfectly all the manga’s energy, anarchy and illogic into the kinetic language of film. When yakuza boss Anjo goes missing with 300 million yen, his loyal lieutenant Kakihara (Tadanobu…