Séance (2000)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa knows how to make a ghost an eerie presence within a frame. Simple and effective in design. A blur where a face should be. An identifying colour in their clothing. Something that registers the eye eventually as they emerge from a shadow or appear in the visual dimension. They don’t seem aggressive in […]

Something In The Dirt (2022)

I really dug Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson’s The Endless. And while I liked Synchronic fine enough, their screen presence as actors – not just as the co-directors, writer and cinematographer of their projects – is an underrated element. Something In The Dirt (2022) was something Moorhead and Benson made during the pandemic, basically filming […]

Foxfur (2012)

Foxfur (2012) won me over by its title credit sequence using Tangerine Dream’s ‘Crystal Voice’ from the original Firestarter film soundtrack, trippy synth ambience over an image of outer space. This is the first film of cult director Damon Packard’s that I’ve now seen, and knowing that it was one hour long and available 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 […]

Petrol (2023)

Petrol (2023) is a new Australian film from director Alena Lodkina. I had only caught up recently with her first, Strange Colours, which screened at Revelation Film Festival and is a father-daughter drama set in the Lightning Ridge opal mining bushlands of New South Wales, which I found to be authentic and artful, patiently compelling. […]