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Fantastic Fest 2012 Review: DOM - A RUSSIAN FAMILY and its Brilliant Brutality

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Fantastic Fest 2012 Review: DOM - A RUSSIAN FAMILY and its Brilliant Brutality

Fantastic Fest 2012 Review: DOM - A RUSSIAN FAMILY and its Brilliant Brutality

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 07:00 PM PDT

And you thought your family reunions were rough... It's a bitter dance of family dynamics and gangster guns a-blazin' in the engaging drama Dom - A Russian Family. With a more serious tone than one might expect, Oleg Pogodin's film reminds a bit of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, but with way more excitement. This is one hidden gem well worth seeking out. The Shamanov family has no shortage of characters. With four generations in one big house, everyone of them is preparing for grandpa's upcoming birthday (except grandpa, who spends his days sitting in wheel chair and staring blankly with his one good eye). The acting patriarch of the family presides over his numerous sons and daughter left under his...

"Yeonghwa: Korean Film Today" Reviews: HELPLESS, JESUS HOSPITAL, BLIND

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 06:30 PM PDT

The third edition of "Yeonghwa: Korean Film Today" is now playing at the Museum of Modern Art, through September 30. This year's selection, which is heavy on independent features, is especially impressive, with young talents offering unique and provocative visions. The series opened with the New York premiere of Hong Sang-soo's latest film In Another Country. The film drops French actress Isabelle Huppert into the usual scenarios of film directors, academics, and male-female relations. Hong has refined his art to the point of sublimity and this new film is no exception. Huppert plays three different women, all named "Anne," and much humor results from how the other Korean characters, especially the love-struck men, relate to her.Below are short reviews of three of this year's selections.Helpless (Byun...

Fantastic Fest 2012: WAKE IN FRIGHT Defies The Mold Of Rural Horrors

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 05:00 PM PDT

Everybody loves a good hillbilly horror film. Of course, the elephant in the room when anyone talks about the terrors of the uncivilized parts of the civilized world is John Boorman's Deliverance. In that film, a group of weekend warriors decide to take a canoeing trip in order to conquer their own primal urges and prove their manhood to themselves. However, they are ambushed by some of the locals and spend the rest of their film running for their lives - when they aren't being emasculated, tortured, and terrified out of their wits. In the years since, the hillbilly horror has become a staple of low budget horror and action films, presumably because of the relatively low production costs and the always effective fear of...

Sniffing Truth: THE PUREST OF LIES Trailer

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 02:33 PM PDT

Here we have the trailer for Carlos Malave fourth film, 'La Pura Mentira'. Having made a name for himself in Venezuela for working at a nerve wracking pace - at least by Venezuelan film standards - this film finds Malave working for the first time as gun for hire with a story written by José Montero and Henry Herrera with the funding of Venezuelan state-owned production company La Villa del Cine. Juana Garcia is a very special lady, she has a supernatural gift, she can detect when someone is lying, but that ability is blocked when she falls in love. Juana has been dipped in a grey and solitary life of which she can only escape by telling a lie....

Fantastic Fest 2012 Review: PARIS BY NIGHT Asks If a Dirty Cop Can Ever Come Clean

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 02:01 PM PDT

Everybody knows Captain Weiss, from doormen to bartenders to dancers to musicians to club owners to shadowy underworld figures. He makes his nightly rounds with quiet assurance and understated authority, negotiating deals, solving problems, doing favors, and occasionally receiving envelopes with a good deal of money inside. Simon Weiss is a veteran vice squad officer, but it's only recently that he's been suspected of corruption. Thus, he's wary of Laurence Dernay, the latest in a long line of drivers who accompany him on his rounds each night. Still, Capt. Weiss carries on with his usual business, speaking very softly and often leaving his gun in the car, reasoning that "not even a moron would shoot an unarmed cop." Capt. Weiss appears to be unflappable,...

Stephen Fung Talks Finding The Next Generation For TAI CHI ZERO

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 01:30 PM PDT

Stephen Fung was on top of the world in 2005. The popular actor had made a successful transition to directing with both his debut feature, Enter The Phoenix, and sophomore effort, House Of Fury, embraced by fans and critics alike. Fung appeared poised to be one of the leaders of a new wave of Hong Kong directors, popular figures who embraced and engaged the young audience in a way that the old guard no longer could.And then Edison Chen happened. In the midst of production on Fung's third feature, Jump, his leading man was caught up in the midst of the biggest sex scandal in Hong Kong entertainment history. Through no fault of his own, Fung's third effort was a catastrophe and the talented young...

TIFF 2012 Review: THERMAE ROMAE

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 01:00 PM PDT

The TIFF programme guide breathlessly extolled the success of Thermae Romae in its native country, declaring the film, based on an extremely popular manga, "Japan's biggest box office hit of the year". This goes to prove a couple things - sometimes, what the masses choose to be their hit of the summer can be completely underwhelming. Secondly, the Japanese really do have a crazy fascination with sitting naked in a tub.I grant you outright that Thermae Romae is tops in its class in time traveling bathing films. Sure, Hot Tub Time Machine touched on reasonably similar themes, and TR lacks both Cripsin Glover and Chevy Chase, but the Japanese film embraces toilet humour in a way that's almost adorable.The film begins in Ancient rome, when...

Review: Rico Maria Ilarde's PRIDYIDER (THE FRIDGE)

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 12:30 PM PDT

The first few scenes of Rico Maria Ilarde's Pridyider immediately reveal a particular milieu that is far removed from the real and the mundane. Tina Benitez (Andi Eigenmann) is first seen aboard a flight back to the Philippines. She is sleeping, dreaming a horrid dream. She immediately wakes up, prompting her seatmate, an amiable old woman who is finally returning to the Philippines from a thirty-year absence, to talk to her, mouthing cryptic statements about looking back to where you came from. She takes a cab driven ominously by Ilarde-regular and frequently used character actor Raul Morit to her new home. A heated discussion on the display of depraved violence in Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay (2009) is heard from the radio. Tina, tired from her trip...

TIFF 2012 Review: HYDE PARK ON THE HUDSON

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 12:00 PM PDT

It may be difficult to get past seeing Hyde Park on the Hudson as anything more than a cynical play at Oscar success, shadowing last year's The King's Speech with another tale of the stuttering King, this time set on Terra Americana. I think this kneejerk reaction would be unfair - love it or hate it, Hyde Park does manage to sink or swim on its own merits, and its contrasts with the other, perfectly acceptable work, are much more varied that simply an Americanization of this type of period film.The story roughly follows the strange relationship between FDR, his wife Eleanor, and his (distant?) cousin Margaret Stuckley. It seems, if this film is to believed, that FDR had a hankering for getting it on...

Fantastic Fest 2012 Review: UNIT 7

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 10:00 AM PDT

As anyone reading, or writing for, Twitch will probably tell you, there's a fine line between genre conventions and outright clichés. To an outsider, someone who's not a fan of a particular genre, anything that looks somewhat familiar can be grounds for dialing the cliché police. Fans, in contrast, have greater patience partly because the same tropes still carry some emotional or aesthetic resonance for them, are even comforting in some ways, and partly because they're just more attuned to nuanced variations on what might appear to be mere formula.So as a fan of crime and cop flicks, there's much that I love about Alberto Rodríguez's Unit 7 (aka Grupo 7): its stylistic boldness and energy, its evocation of a particular time and place (Seville of 20+ years...

First Look At Jim Carrey In KICK-ASS 2

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 09:00 AM PDT

With the Jeff Wadlow directed Kick-Ass 2 now in production on set stills have begun to pop up online including the one you see to your left. Yes, that is Jim Carrey in costume as The Colonel. Though the first Kick-Ass didn't quite tear it up at the box office the way the online chatter indicated it would the film still has a large and loyal cult - of which I am very much one - eager to see what comes next.The costumed high-school hero Kick-Ass joins with a group of normal citizens who have been inspired to fight crime in costume. Meanwhile, the Red Mist plots an act of revenge that will affect everyone Kick-Ass knows.Chloe Moretz, Aaron Johnson and Christopher Mintz-Plasse all return....

Fantastic Fest 2012 Review: THE CONSPIRACY Makes You Paranoid, But Don't Tell Anybody

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 08:30 AM PDT

With absolute conviction and unwavering intelligence, The Conspiracy unpacks complex theories and raises disturbing questions that are not easily dismissed. What distinguishes the faux-documentary framework from any number of "mock docs" is that writer/director Christopher MacBride doesn't pretend that his film has been made by clueless amateurs. His approach is dead-on accurate, pulling the viewer inexorably into a world of paranoid conspiracies Aaron and Jim, two young Canadian filmmakers, decide to make a documentary about conspiracy theorists, and land a peach of a subject for their first interview. Crying out to passerbys with a bullhorn -- "Slaves!" -- and living in a trash-strewn apartment with an entire wall covered in newspaping clippings and nearly-unintelligible scribblings, Terrance clearly fits the profile of a member of...

Visit Jorge Olguin's Ghost Ship In First CALEUCHE: THE CALL OF THE SEA Images

Posted: 22 Sep 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Chile's Jorge Olguin returns to screens across the region November 8th with his new feature Caleuche: The Call Of The Sea. The story revolves around Isabel (Giselle Itié, a Boston based marine biologist who opts to return to her family home in Chiloé Island following a serious illness. What she discovers is a ghost ship known to the locals as Caleuche.Olguin has shared the first stills from the film with us and they're an interesting batch of images, some of which tip a clear H.P. Lovecraft influence. Take a look below....
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