Trouble Every Day (2001)

When it comes to Claire Denis, the word I think of is “elliptical.” The opening of Trouble Every Day (2001) begins with a couple kissing in a car at night, a couple who are not even characters in the film. We also see the Seine river at night, the water lapping under street light. A […]

Vengeance Is Mine (1984)

Typing Vengeance Is Mine as a movie title produces a few results including the Shōhei Imamura movie from 1979 and a direct to video Steven Seagal action flick from 2010. For Michael Roemer’s film, Vengeance Is Mine (1984), which he wrote and directed, the title might give the wrong impression. It is not a revenge […]

Afire (2023)

To me, unlikeable characters can be great protagonists. Sometimes they help identify and purge the unlikeable parts inside of us. Like with the pretentious writer Leon (Thomas Schubert) in director Christian Petzold’s Afire (2023). A classic stick in the mud, Leon accompanies his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) to a holiday house in Felix’s family, out […]

Coma (2022)

Bedroom pop? Or bedroom shoegaze? More like bedroom darkwave. Dedicated in an opening narration to his 18 year old daughter, French director Bertrand Bonello made Coma (2022) during Covid lockdown and frames the teenage bedroom as its setting. Even with the alarms outside reiterating lockdown curfew, the sight of a teenager stuck in their bedroom, […]

Charisma (1999)

1999 is often discussed as a great year in cinema, and key to that is because it was 1999. All the celebrated and successful films of that year tend to share themes about the destruction of the old, the beginning of the new. Or are vibrating on end of the century, millennium anxieties – fear […]