Last Year At Marienbad (1961)

Guests in suits and evening dresses. A palace repurposed as a hotel. Refinement that feels like another time, another place. The camera tracks through the hallways, taking in the space, the high ceilings, the ornate interior decoration. In the hotel, people often stand still, pausing as if waiting for direction. Like actors in the small […]

Pacifiction (2022)

The white suit. When commissioner De Roller (Benoît Magimel), an official of France working in Tahiti, rides on a boat towards a surfing competition as part of his duties, he waves to a couple of people on the shore. It struck me how the white suit De Roller constantly wears in Pacifiction (2022), which seems […]

The Novelist’s Film (2022)

I’m still reading Dennis Lim’s book about Hong Sang-soo’s film Tale Of Cinema, which is used to discuss the prolific auteur’s body of work. I’ve seen a lot of Sang-soo’s films this year, mainly due to the fact that many of them were added to SBS OnDemand. By seeing more than one of Sang-soo’s productions, […]

Dark Breed (1996)

Delving further into the world of PM Entertainment productions was a highlight for me of 2023, a repository for direct-to-video B-grade action schlock from the 1980s and 1990s, where they put the money on the screen with the amount of explosions featured, cars flipped on the streets and stunt-people flung through the air. My compulsion […]

Liebestraum (1991)

Liebestraum (1991) takes its title from the Franz Liszt composition; we hear a swing-era version playing on a turntable when a couple are murdered during their after-hours affair. The titular piece of music is one fetish object in director-writer Mike Figgis’ neo-noir narrative, but it is supplanted another fetish object – the building itself. A […]