Tag: Review
A Wounded Fawn opens with a quote from Surrealist painter and author Leonora Carrington: “I suddenly became aware that I was both mortal and touchable and that I could be destroyed“. Centering the film around a serial-killer protagonist who slowly comes to the same realization, director Travis Stevens (Girl on the Third Floor, Jakob’s Wife)
Have you at any point while watching a particularly messy death scene in cinema thought to yourself “I’d hate to be the one to clean up that mess”? Or would you be willing to roll up your sleeves and dive in elbow deep through the gooey entrails that may once have a person, scrubbing until
Jishu eiga, abbreviated from jishu seisaku eiga and translating roughly to “autonomously-produced”, is an elusive, self-sufficient form of filmmaking popularised during the decline of mainstream Japanese cinema around the 1970’s. Mostly filmed on 8mm film and chiefly witnessed at a handful of specialist film festivals, this independent form of filmmaking helped launch the directorial careers
In the summer of 2009, a Korean blogger claimed to have seen a strange creature near Jangsan, a mountain in Busan. The following year, the creature was spotted again. As of March 2013, there had been 14 recorded sightings, six of which put the creature at Jangsan. Described as having a sloth-like shape and long
Beneath its table of contents, Revenant’s Hymn offers a comprehensive list of content warnings. From violence and suicide to eye trauma and Nazism, Elliott Dunstan’s third collection of short stories runs the gamut of traumatic themes and disturbing content. Dunstan exploits every weakness a reader might possess, inching split and bloodied fingernails into the nooks
“Capitalism is nothing before the forces of love and passion!” So declares an impossibly pregnant woman’s stalker in The Embodiment, the second story in this intricate puzzle box of a collection from Korean author Bora Chung. Cursed Bunny offers 10 stories of capitalist corruption, misogyny and patriarchy: ghost stories, speculative fiction, and darkly comic fairy
To say that Shinji Sômai is one of the greats of cinema is an understatement. He is quoted as describing his directing philosophy as “humanity observing humanity,” his approach was vastly different from that seen in Japan at the time. As such, his films all have an unyielding realism to their story and characters, strongly
The evolution of action films has come a long way over the years; from cheesy one-liners and over-the-top shootouts, the genre has progressed to slick visuals and epic hand-to-hand combat. Although the old style is still prevalent with fans today, these present-day techniques are vastly superior in displayed skill from both the director and the
For as long as it has been a viable means for sharing media, the internet has been a fascination of the morbidly curious. Forums and sites set up on both the surface and deep web dedicated to the spread of gratuitous, real life videos of death, becoming common knowledge in our society and reflected in
One of the biggest highlights of the Japan Film Fest Hamburg rests within the diverse selection of short films. For the audience, this means getting the chance to see original shorts seldom screened outside of Japan and unlikely to ever release in the West. The fest embracing multiple genres, too, ensures a varied experience. This