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, […]

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 […]

Winter Kills (1979)

Winter Kills (1979) is the absurdist extension of the conspiracy thriller in vogue during the 1970s. Imagine The Parallax View, a riff on imagined counter narratives to the official record of the JFK assassination, but exaggerated with a strange comedy, not quite spoof or parody. Each scene in Winter Kills is eventually marked by a […]

Kids Return (1996)

Kids Return (1996) is a title I remember because it would always be programmed on SBS. I was aware of Takeshi Kitano as a teenager, mainly when Fireworks was released and received praise from critics like Margaret and David on The Movie Show. There’s a power and beauty to Fireworks with the subplot of the […]

Mike’s Murder (1984)

We don’t see the murder. Director and writer James Bridges apparently filmed one, and it was part of the negative test screenings that forced him to re-edit and structurally rearrange Mike’s Murder (1984) before its release. The original intention with Mike’s Murder was a film that was subjective with dream sequences and flashbacks; what was […]