Seventh Code (2013)

Seventh Code (2013): file under the category of “good one-hour movies.” Shot and filmed in Russia, a young Japanese woman named Akiko (Atsuko Maeda, pop singer and former member of girl group AKB48) races into frame, dragging a suitcase behind her. She is in pursuit of a Japanese man in a suit, Matsunaga (Ryohei Suzuki) […]

On The Beach At Night Alone (2017)

A beach is always a contemplative site in cinema, and South Korean director Hong Sang-soo seems to return to it as a space for his characters. On The Beach At Night Alone (2017) features two beaches – one in Hamburg, the other in South Korea – and neither takes place in the pitch-black of night […]

Piercing (2018)

Sanctuary, a film about the power balance in a BDSM arrangement, stars Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley, in a hotel-set two-hander with dark psycho-sexual themes. It almost felt like Abbott had made this movie before, or was making a habit of using his deep black eyes and dramatic intensity to be in a ruinous pairing […]

I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians (2018)

I was a fan of Romanian director Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, and was reading recent interviews with him about his next film doing the festival rounds. This compelled me to track down some of his earlier films, and the only one available on SBS On Demand is I Do Not Care […]

Grass (2018)

“I believe that my films are not made to express a story, but to feature some fragments” – Hong Sang-soo. A couple catch up in a cafe. Classical music plays on the stereo; apparently the cafe owner loves classical music. At times, the music swells and almost drowns out the conversation. Then again, what seems […]