Mars Express (2023)

Mars Express (2023) is a French animated movie that recently screened at the Fantastic Film Festival. What caught my eye was that Mars Express is firmly in the cyberpunk genre, inspired by Blade Runner and Japanese anime like Ghost In The Shell. Set in the 23rd century, the Earth is a sprawl where lower class […]

The Creatures (1966)

I had a cursory understanding of what The Creatures (1966), written and directed by Agnes Varda, was about. The film opens with a couple – Edgar (Michel Piccoli) and Mylene (Catherine Deneuve) – driving together, Mylene warning Edgar not to drive too fast, and upon that, they inevitably crash. What I was taken aback by […]

Don’t Torture A Duckling (1972)

The copy of director Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture A Duckling (1972) on Tubi that I watched felt like it was an older DVD transfer uploaded as the image quality was desaturated and a little fuzzy, which added to how the Italian village of Accendura comes across in the movie. The rocky hills seem almost yellow […]

Variety (1983)

A young white woman sitting in a ticket booth for a porno theatre. The key image to Variety (1983) that I had in my head before watching it. New York city in its grimy, sleazy prime. “The old New York” is an idea that has been mythologised into nostalgia, often calcified (HBO’s The Deuce, for […]

Pulse (2001)

I don’t know how director Kiyoshi Kurosawa and his collaborators pull this off, but in an opening sequence of Pulse (2001) where we observe a young woman visit a friend’s apartment, cutting from her travel in a bus interior to walking down a street to walking up the apartment block stairs, all of this is […]