Suntan begins as an R-rated, Greek Islands take on The Office. The middle-aged and miserable Kostis (Makis Papadimitriou) is transferred to a tiny island to serve as their only doctor. As Christmas rains give way to summer sun, Kostis begins tagging along with a group of irreverent young tourists and struggles to strike up a…
Action flick Bastille Day opens with a naked Frenchwoman (Stéphane Caillard) strolling through Paris. We soon learn that her nudity is intended to serve as a particularly dramatic distraction, allowing pickpocket Michael Mason (Game of Thrones’ Richard Madden) to pilfer a few wallets and passports at the orders of a local fence (Eriq Ebouaney). With…
You’d be forgiven for thinking that The Duke of Burgundy – a film essentially about a lesbian couple’s experimentations with BDSM – would stray towards the exploitative. But despite the subject matter, writer/director Peter Strickland downplays the erotic aspects of the film to emphasis an abstract evocation of the anxieties inherent in a long-term relationship.…
I can’t really complain about the woeful storytelling on display in Dragon Academy’s first episode. The series – set in a medieval-kingdom-slash-high-school where students train dragons – is the kind of slight anime entertainment that I don’t expect much from. So I can forgive the preponderance of “As you know, your father, the king” dialogue…
A Bigger Splash is a distinctly musical film. It’s a music film, too – with Tilda Swinton channelling her versatile Bowie charisma as a world-famous rockstar and Ralph Fiennes exhibiting some irrepressible dance moves as a record producer – but what makes the film sing is how director Luca Guadagnino effortlessly bridges its distinct tones.…
So I Can’t Play H! is a fanservice anime. Or maybe the fanservice anime, given how shamelessly it’s calibrated to accommodate animated depictions of the naked female form. Here’s its premise: a slender Grim Reaper named Lisara (Aya Endo) strikes a deal with perverted high-schooler Ryosuke (Hiro Shimono), wherein he will supply her with ‘energy’ that…
I wanted to hate Youth. I usually walk into movies wanting to like/love them, but given my antipathy for Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning The Great Beauty, I was hoping for some more ammunition in my argument that it’s terribly overrated. Youth gave me sufficient ammunition, I’ll give it that. Sorrentino’s take on affluent, existential aimlessness, spent…
Dope begins with three dictionary definitions of the title, suiting the purposeful restlessness of a movie that’s neatly trisected into three distinct sections: each one assured, stylish and articulate. The first half is a teen film – all the colourful kineticism of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl except with, y’know, something to say…
Freezing Vibration is the follow-up to Freezing, a 2011 fanservice anime which suffered from lacking any apparent target audience. Taking a conventional premise – a primarily female-populated high school spiced up with frequent magically-augmented battles – the first season failed to provide any kind of interesting plot, wasting its time on progressively tiresome hierarchical disputes.…
On the way to completing my Science degree, most of my electives were spent on Philosophy courses, thanks to a roughly-equal combination of intellectual inquisitiveness and a desire for bludgey subjects. My favourite course was probably the one titled Philosophy of Time Travel, which looked at the philosophical and metaphysical ramifications of time travel; specifically,…
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