The Novelist’s Film (2022)

I’m still reading Dennis Lim’s book about Hong Sang-soo’s film Tale Of Cinema, which is used to discuss the prolific auteur’s body of work. I’ve seen a lot of Sang-soo’s films this year, mainly due to the fact that many of them were added to SBS OnDemand. By seeing more than one of Sang-soo’s productions, […]

Apartment Zero (1988)

Two roommates in Buenos Aires getting to know each other over breakfast, the British owner of the apartment, Adrian DeLuc (Colin Firth) asks the new American tenant, Jack Carney (Hart Bochner), “Do you like cinema?” The film, Apartment Zero (1988), then cuts to an exterior shot of the cinema that Adrian runs, Adrian and Jack […]

Merry-Go-Round (1981)

“… generally considered a failure – but what a failure it is!” A quote from the Mubi “our take” description accompanying Jacques Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round (1981), and if you do any cursory reading around the film’s making you can understand why even the director himself considered it a “failure”. The third of four planned movies he […]

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 […]

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 […]