A Tale Of Sorrow And Sadness (1977)

My knowledge of Seijun Suzuki as a director is around his 1960s gangster movies like Youth Of The Beast, Tokyo Drifter and Branded To Kill. All of which are shot through with distinctive black comedy and visual panache that made Suzuki beloved to directors he later inspired like Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch. While there’s […]

Rodrigo D: No Future (1990)

Imaginalia is a free film club held at Fremantle Buffalo Club – projecting a movie in a bar, basically – that finished up their first program, which had included screenings of Cruising (1980) and Effi Briest (1974). The organiser and programmer, Juan Mora, is from Colombia and selected for the last night of Program 1, […]

License To Live (1998)

There’s a shot in License To Live (1998), directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, where the main character’s father sits in a chair at the foot of his bed. Cast in shadows, the father is telling his son that he’s leaving after their brief reunion, and he resembles a ghost drained of colour. Kurosawa is best known […]

Exiled (2006)

Exiled (2006) is Hong Kong director Johnnie To’s tribute to the spaghetti western embedded within a contemporary gangster film. The opening sequence sets the tone. An apartment where a woman, Jin (Josie Ho) feeds a baby, waiting for her partner, Wo (Nick Cheung). She is visited by two sets of men. One duo – Blaze […]

Still Life (2006)

I was watching Still Life (2006) in several sittings due to timing and being away on holiday. Not an ideal way to experience the film, and one I would have loved to have seen in a cinema, but its approach and tone suited the intermittent immersion. Dipping in and out of the movie like I […]