“Sisu”, text states at the beginning of the film with that word as its title, “is a Finnish word that cannot be translated”. This assertion is immediately undermined by following text which proceeds precisely to offer a translation: “It means a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination. Sisu manifests itself when all hope is…
One of the ways that cinema can portray the end of innocence is to take things that would normally appeal to children and to infuse them with fear, distress or disgust. David Hand’s animated Bambi (1942) for Disney might have been very much aimed at children, but also traumatised many of its young viewers with…
Boots On The Ground first published by SciFiNow In October 2014 – the eve of the British pull-out from conflict in Afghanistan – a unit of five squaddies is under fire in the Hindu Kush. Coming to a huge British-engineered fort (“Leftovers from the First Afghan War”, as one of them wryly observes), they see…
Gemini (aka Soseiji) first published by Little White Lies, as entry 115 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column By the time Shinya Tsukamoto helmed Gemini (aka Soseiji) in 1999, he had already established for himself an idiosyncratic filmmaking language all his own. His features like Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), its bigger budget 1992 sequel Tetsuo…
Skylines (Sklyin3s) first published by VODzilla.co As Critters 4 (1992), Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996), Leprechaun 4: In Space (1996) and Jason X (2001) have taught us, the laws of cinema dictate that all gonzo franchises will eventually lose their grip on any kind of grounding reality and end up in space. Colin and Greg Strause’s Skyline…
Casshern first published by Movie Gazette In 1973, Tatsunoko Productions created an animated series for Japanese television called Shinzo Ningen Casshan, about a heroic superfighter named Casshan who defended the human race against wicked androids accidentally unleashed by his father’s experiments. It was pretty much your standard good-versus-evil anime, daft enough to find room even…
Like many a psychological thriller, The Ascent (aka Black Ops, aka Stairs) features a primal scene that it visits at the film’s beginning, and then revisits and revises numerous times during the course of its characters’ journey towards a reckoning. In an Eastern European war zone, a British special ops squad of six – Will…
White Chamber first published by SciFiNow Strap: Paul Raschid accommodates war’s horrific paradoxes in a plain white room. “The United Kingdom, Soon”, reads the text that opens White Chamber – and already the film’s ironies and contradictions are setting in. For in this near future, the Kingdom is the opposite of United. Civil war divides the…
Onibaba first published by EyeforFilm A bloody, protracted and pointless quarrel between rival emperors has torn feudal Japan apart. While they await the return of their conscripted husbands, a woman (writer/director Kaneto Shindo’s wife, Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) have taken desperate measures to survive, murdering any soldiers who wander into their grass field,…
Tangerines (Mandariinid) published by Sight & Sound, October 2015 Review: While Tangerines (Mandariinid) opens with a brief on-screen text describing the 1992 civil war between ethnic Georgians and Russian-supported Abkhaz separatists that sent most local Estonian settlers fleeing back home, the first images we see in the film are of ‘grandpa’ Ivo (Estonian acting legend…
The Hurt Locker first published by Film4 Synopsis: Powerful drama probing the internal wiring of soldiers involved in the Iraq War. By the director of Near Dark, Point Break and K-19, Kathryn Bigelow. Review: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” This quote, lifted from renowned…